Former aide to the Russian President, Vladislav Surkov was placed under house arrest. This was reported on April 11 on Facebook by Ilya Ponomarev, ex-member of the State Duma (parliament) of the Russian Federation (he was the only MP who on March 20, 2014 voted in the State Duma against the annexation of Crimea).

“Vladislav Surkov is under house arrest. Investigations are ongoing in the case in the case of embezzlement in the Donbas since 2014” – he wrote.

Surkov’s problems began back in 2016 after SurkovLeaks

For those who did not follow Surkov, his career woes began after the Ukrainian Cyber Alliance hacked into the emails of his office and transferred all the retrieved information to InformNapalm. In 2016 we exclusively published the dumps of the hacked correspondence. This event was widely covered by Western media. We called this case #SurkovLeaks. Materials based on this dump were published on our website in 11 languages of the world.

Notably, in the SurkovLeaks (part 2) investigations we wrote that Surkov oversaw the smuggling of fuels and lubricants for his own gain in the occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. A subsidiary company was set up in Russia under Surkov’s control that bought fuel at commodity exchange prices and used Russian Railways for customs clearance and delivery of the fuel into Ukrainian territory, to rail stations in Donetsk Oblast. Surkov and his entourage earned handsomely on these operations.

Our publications visibly shook Surkov, multiple photos with his haggard appearance circled the web.

Double impact. 2019

The second powerful blow to Surkov was dealt in 2019, when the International Joint Investigation Team (JIT), which was investigating the MH17 crash in the Donbas, also referred to InformNapalm publications of SurkovLeaks series in their materials.

Also in 2019, the British Royal United Services Institute published their report The Surkov Leaks: the inner kitchen of the Russian hybrid war against Ukraine, which was prepared by the editor-in-chief of Euromaidan Press Alya Shandra and British politician, member of the British Parliament Robert Seeley.

Shortly thereafter, in 2020, Surkov was removed from his post as the aide to the Russian President and his career went into free fall.

Conclusion

It turns out, Vladislav Surkov, who was seen as the ideologue of the Novorossiya project and the author of the hybrid war concept in the Donbas, simply had been feeding disinformation to Putin for about 6 years, while swindling the aging dictator out of a lot of money. At a certain moment Putin realized that he had been misinformed all this time, and went to the other extreme. He switched his favors and attention to the hawks who promised him that the solution to the “Ukrainian question” could in 2-3 days. As a result, Putin was deceived twice, first by Surkov, and then by another Kremlin tower.

We are glad that InformNapalm played a key role in this story and planted a powerful delayed-action mine under the Kremlin, so that all these spiders in the jar began to devour each other.

Read and recommend our Telegram channel. Our war did not start in 2022, we have been waging it since 2014. And many topics that we have been developing for a very long time are now bearing fruit https://t.me/informnapalm 

InformNapalm does not receive any financial support from any country’s government or large donors. Only community volunteers and our readers help us to maintain the site. Please support the development of InformNapalm, the unique volunteer intelligence resource, with donations through Patreon.